Is This What Happiness Boils Down To?

Scientists have uncovered the essential elements of a woman’s perfect day

‘The perfect day” – the very phrase is enough to make your neck unhunch from your shoulders and head turn musingly cloudward, a wistful smile playing about your face. Adult life’s mess of obligations and responsibilities means that such reveries are the stuff of universal imagination. More so, perhaps, for women, being the great multitaskers and fantasists that we are.

If we were to believe advertising platitudes, the perfect feminine day would be wiled away on chocolate, in baths surrounded by candles, with immaculate children hovering somewhere in the middle distance. Our heroine would then hit the sack to read about a rich, ginger sadist with a penchant for slapping about gormless virgins, written in barely literate prose.

Happily, a group of German and American researchers, from the University of Bremen and the Georgia Institute of Technology, have discovered that our wants are slightly more sophisticated. Writing in the Journal of Economic Psychology, the scientists explained that what we are really after is 24 hours of well-slept, vaguely social simplicity.